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User blog:Rich Varney/Week 9
Exhibition Space: At our meeting on Monday, the team agreed that the Physics building would have to come through by Tuesday 4 August for us to consider switching to it from rooms 1013 and 1014 in the Arts block. Any later than this will affect our ability to plan properly for the space we are in. Having checked with Glenn through the week as of Friday 31 July there has been no further contact with the physics department and things do not look promising. So the arts block it is. One thought of the team is to review our aesthetic in light of the location and go for a broken/glitchy technology look and feel that would better suit the room we are using. The challenge in taking that path is fitting it in with our narrative. Two sub-teams with reps from each group have been set up to handle joint PR for the installations and planning/organising the shared space. Niamh is our rep on the former and Gemma is handling the latter. We have asked if it would be possible to get some photos inside the physics building so that people could use these in their portfolios. Concrete plans for our space need to start being made in the coming week so that we can begin sourcing materials that we need. I brought in some old curtains this week that we can possibly make use of for the installation. Unfortunately they have been used as dust sheets for the last 15 years, so have some paint stains, we can possibly hide these or use to our advantage. 3D Printer The 3D printer is proving to be a little bit glitchy. It is certainly better at simpler shapes, but even then some prints come out better than others for no apparent reason. High quality prints are not coming out significantly better than ones done on low quality settings. Ronan, the technician feels that it is not printing as well with the new print nozzles than it was with the original ones that became clogged. Gearoid printed some busts of Einstein on Friday and these had gaps. We may be able to use this to our advantage with the glitchy aesthetic however. Pocket watch time dilation: The wooden tea-cup and saucer for the TFT display are complete. After some modifications, the 3D printed model to sit in the top of the display is now fitting around the screen correctly. I have two versions of this model – one has a rectangular cut out for the screen, the other is round. The round one looks nicer in the cup, but it makes the area of screen displayed quite small (45mm in diameter). This may be too small to relay the information clearly to the user. I will do some tests with both the printed plates to see which looks best when the display is in use. NFC / RFID: I did some experiments with the NFC tags to see if they would work with Niamh's pocket watches. The idea would be that visitors get an object such as a pocket watch that they can use to trigger things around the installation. Unfortunately the metal on the watches totally disrupts the signal and the tags will not work. I tried turning a wooden pocket watch using a watch insert with a tag placed behind. This is more successful, but only works with the tag read from the back as the metal in the clock insert interferes with the signal. This is not ideal as I want to put a reader inside a teapot and have the user dunk the watch inside. I thus need the tag to be read from any orientation. I considered 3D printing, but it will be difficult to produce a watch that looks realistic and is robust given the performance of the 3D printer so far. I feel the look of these is important and I do not want the watches to have a glitchy or cheap look regardless of us going for that aesthetic elsewhere in the exhibit. I am now experimenting with a dummy watch set into wood. This will consist of a printed watch face covered in clear resin. This throws up a number of problems from a woodturning standpoint, which while interesting too woodturners, are not relevant from a technical standpoint to the project. Nonetheless these will take some thought and effort to overcome. Category:Blog posts